


Scientia media

by deepandlovelydark



Series: Ecstasy in Cosmogone [5]
Category: Sunless Sea, fallen london - Fandom
Genre: And how, Epistolary, Ethics, Genderfluid Character, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, POV Second Person, Power Imbalance, Spies & Secret Agents, Theology, philosophical noodling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 01:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: ...the terror it is, that gives the Zee Captain their awful, unquestionable potency. Take that away, and who knows what mutinies might flourish?There is a book going from hand to hand, aboard your ship. Yesterday it was the Mechanic's turn to borrow it, with haste and furtive guilt.Almost as if he knew you spied him out.





	Scientia media

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silvereye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/gifts).



> From the PC's POV. Set after the creation of the Impeller.

You are, as ever, curious. All else may change, flux or wither; that aspect never so. Otherwise you might as well stay home in London, claiming kinship to the sloth.

Your Tireless Mechanic scarcely sleeps in his quarters, which puzzles the crew mightily. The juniors in the engine room murmur fears to each other in small whispers: diagnosing laudanum addiction, mirror fatigue, darkdrop overdose. Their elders are less anxious, more salacious. They joke that he need only touch the Impeller's grim ivory each morning, to find his youth restored. 

All of which is arrant nonsense. He still often goes without sleep, out of habit; but when he does, it's beneath your quilted parrot-feather duvet. 

(Where he is now, drowsing in comfort rare and precious for a Foundling squatter. That's how you know your search won't be interrupted.)

Other luxuries, he does not take easily. Even now he refuses wine, shakes his head at honey, claims nothing from you except yourself- and that is not what you expect, as either lover or captain. Your relationships are transactional; your knowledge of a dozen romantic ports may be boiled down to terms of business. This many bottles of wine for Godfall, so much fuel carted to the Empire of Hands. A chart of the Unterzee reads as a sorrow-spider's webbing of trade routes: sharp corners here, wise navigation there, heedful of wastage and efficiency. Yours is one of the finest ships afloat, and the Mechanic might have any little delicacy he cared to name- but he doesn't. 

(The Carnelian Exile opines that he is fulfilled now, and seeks nothing more from life now his quest has been accomplished. This much you know about the Carnelian Exile; should she ever reach the culmination her heart desires, it will be tinged with the bitter dissatisfaction of one who, having achieved everything, now has nothing.) 

No: if the Impeller was his price, he would have wooed you first, in upfront payment. Instead he waited, shy, for you to give the word. 

The classic theologian's justification for God's absence - how is love to be given, consent granted, when the gulf between spheres is so vast? A captain may dispose of any of their crew, at need; and need has covered a multitude of sins. Every Docker born knows well that when the Captain's lust is slaked, their voyages are softer, kinder, less troubled; and to every last stoker, their union forbids such interchange. Let officers bear the burden, they're paid enough. 

(Does the matter concern, or merely interest you? Either way there's food for thought - and here's the dark cat of curiosity again, a-licking of its paws with pleasure.) 

The engine room is quiet tonight. Where Aestival compels, zailors follow; another reason for your taking up the hunt tonight. It wouldn't aid in ship cohesion, to see their captain go sifting through engineering cruft and coal-dust, searching through toolboxes, stepping through the haphazard mazes of machinery. 

Moving. Acting, living, being, instead of merely ordering. 

The act of concealment backfires upon itself. Here is a small latch, in a place where there need be no such thing. Clutching a door fast, a door set into the heart of an engine (the old one, so frail when set besides the new). A model for the Impeller's heart, perhaps? Presumably less lethal, then; and you have your candle, as ever. 

Inside, there is dust, and darkness, and little more to catch the eye. A few small contrivances lie scattered about, fluted glass and copper wire. Fragile things. One smashes, after what seems the lightest of taps. 

(The act might make you draw a breath, a little more sharply; or perhaps it did not. The more adept one is at living in the Neath, the less the consequences seem to matter.)

Your Mechanic's book lies here. You take it, leaf through the pages. Revolutionary propaganda, aimed at destabilising the Bazaar's power by inciting a general strike. Nothing unusual then, nothing you haven't seen before. It is the implication rather than the act that interests you now. 

Also, the bookmark. A crumpled letter, torn unevenly at the top, with red diagonal lines running along the sides. The typesetter rat's signifier of a spoilt copy (given your Mechanic's utter mania for both rats and blueprints, you couldn't have avoided learning this mark if you'd wanted to). 

_But I'd never dared express desire for my Jack-of-Smiles. I mean, how could I? Morality, and obviously not a little fear, and then again I will bury myself in technical manuals and gimcracks for weeks on end, which is a very unsatisfactory state for a lover... and then this Captain comes along, to be my everything._

_I owe them, for my sanity and my apotheosis; they owe me, for an engine that might carry them to empire. All fair there. Emotionally I am at their mercy, and they- I believe- are at mine. That miraculous leveler, love, nothing's fair about that._

_Balanced against all that, one simple fact: that any day, at their very whim, they might set course for Kingeater's and order my body hacked into mincemeat for the table._

_Recalling your sense of humour, I can just imagine you warning the same of any lover. Fair enough, but they haven't all a ship of hefty zailors to make it happen. Staving off the irrational, here in this mad Neath, is generally enough of a feat for one distracted engineer without balancing fraught emotion in the equation...and there's more power than that, in their orders. So many captains are an absence; this one is a Presence._

_I keep remembering a small parable you told me once. About what madness the Bazaar would bring in Its wake, should It ever deign to walk the stolen streets in our reflected guise. How sympathetic It would seem at first, drinking up stories and returning them with such clear precision, such nice fervour, that devilish sports would prove innocent play by comparison. Frankly, I am terrified. Terrified that my captain is in all ways so much what I desire, not what I should think I should want; terrified that I draw them to this state, when they might be better off without my influence; terrified by anyone who should have acquiesced to all my outrageous demands, for the sake of what I offer. I've had the best of one dangerous bargain, more by luck than judgement. To fall into another so soon is...too soon, I suppose. Far too soon._

_But then they'll be wanting someone else, I've no doubt, and so offloading my woes on another isn't very satisfactory. Only putting off the question, and I've had enough of putting life away untouched. Perhaps I'm going soft, or perhaps I'd like to; there's so much I haven't allowed myself to dream of (hah!) with this Impeller possessing me. Some wishes that I might trick myself into believing for the benefit of others. Hot coffee and fresh fruit for the squatters at Frostfound. A long stay for me at Pigmote, to talk shop with the rat guilds. Or a visit to Irem, to steal glimpses of forbidden futures-_

_o, how am I to tell if I'm consenting or not? A guess, at best! I'm only a simple mechanic- and then, would it be my duty to love It, if It loves me? To bring something new to that lacre sea- not joy but easy, simple contentment? Patient happiness, that would bring peace without kidnapping cities and making use of bats?_

_I don't know that I could even do it. If It doesn't understand the simple pleasures of hewing wood or drawing water, of crafting beautiful new structures, I don't know that the matter will bear explaining... but then, I shouldn't talk of innocence. A sage burns at the heart of my engine, and sacrifice is something my Captain understands very well indeed._

_As if I stand at the crossroads between Heaven and Hell, and when told to choose between the two, find myself hesitating. For I don't know which way the signpost points._

_But they would._

_Perhaps I'll leave it in their hands, after all..._

 ***********

When the Mechanic awakes, he starts to see you sitting besides him, the letter in your hands. 

"I thought-" he begins. 

(You know, precisely, how you desire this to end.)

(Enjoy your consummation.)


End file.
